


A Chance, In Your Hand

by luninosity



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) RPF
Genre: Drunk Dialing, Fluff, Love Confessions, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-11
Updated: 2012-10-11
Packaged: 2017-11-16 02:16:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/534367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Michael drinks a lot of gin and misses James. He can totally call James, just to say hello, because that's what friends do, right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Chance, In Your Hand

**Author's Note:**

> This was my first-ever McFassy fic, guys! I even still like it. Title courtesy of Eve 6's song "Not Gonna Be Alone Tonight".

Gin, Michael decided, was a terrible thing. He was never drinking gin again.  
   
He was sitting on the steps outside—where was he, anyway? A theater? Why?—outside _some_ theater, probably still in Los Angeles, or at least he hoped he was still in Los Angeles, because if not, he had much larger problems than he’d initially thought.  
   
Why a theater, again?  
   
Oh…right. Some sort of X-Men preview screening. For very important people. And there had been a lot of free alcohol, of which Michael had taken too much advantage, because James wasn’t there and therefore the whole _very important people_ concept had been, in one very specific James-shaped way, incomplete.  
   
James was important people. This fact was perfectly clear, despite the gin. The world just didn’t feel the same without a Scottish accent and blue eyes at his side. It wasn’t bad, or anything, it just wasn’t…right. He’d spent half the evening thinking of comments, jokes, things that would make James laugh, except when he’d wanted to share them, James hadn’t been standing at his side.  
   
Not James’s fault, though. He was in New York, doing the same thing that Michael was supposed to be doing, namely turning up at the East Coast preview night and charming the important people over there. James was _good_ at being charming. Everyone just loved him, all the time. And he genuinely liked people, cared about them, and even remembered the names of all the interchangeable interviewers and asked after their families, and everyone went away feeling, just for a minute, special, because James liked people for themselves, just because of who they were.  
   
He stared at the cracks in the concrete steps, where they ran under the edge of the faded red carpet and disappeared. James liked _everyone_. The problem was, Michael wasn’t as good at liking everyone, but he did like James, more than he should; he liked the way that James laughed, and the way his hair fell into his eyes, and the passion he put into every single moment of every scene, and the way he smiled up at Michael, sometimes, as if they were the only two people in the world.  
   
James would probably even have liked the cracks in the concrete. He’d said once that imperfections made life exciting.  
   
Gin made life more exciting, too, but not in good ways. Maybe he should call a cab.  
   
Maybe he should call James. If he called James, and said, “I’m sitting alone outside a theater looking at cracks in the ground and I miss you and I’ve had a lot of gin and I think I’m in love with you,” would James come find him?  
   
James was in New York. Probably busy. Probably not drinking gin. Probably not sitting alone on very cold hard concrete and coming to the not-really-very-surprising realization that he was in love with his co-star, either.  
   
When had he gotten his phone out of his pocket? He couldn’t help being a little impressed by the way he’d managed to retain enough coordination for that. Those pockets had _buttons_.  
   
He could totally call James, then. Just to say hello. Because friends did that, they checked in with each other, and no one would say the word love, and Michael wouldn’t mention that he’d been wondering about the taste of James’s lips, or whether the freckles on his arms could be found other places, too. He could call James and not say these things out loud. He’d managed to not say these things out loud for quite a long time now. He was good at not saying them, at saying them only in his own head, only when it was very late at night.  
   
Or, of course, after all the gin.  
   
Or approximately every five minutes, when James smiled at him.  
   
Okay, he thought, and poked at the phone. It took a couple of tries to figure out which number was which, but he was reasonably sure he’d got the right one.  
   
James answered on the first ring. Like he _knew_ , somehow. Amazing, Michael thought, and said so. “You’re amazing.”  
   
“I am? Why’s that, then?” The Scottish accent felt warm, Michael decided. Familiar. It mostly filled the space that had been empty all night, beside him.  
   
“Because you can read minds. Except you can’t.” Probably a good thing, considering.  
   
“Are you drunk? Where are you?”  
   
“Yes. Very. I’m…outside the theater. Where are you?” It didn’t sound like James was at the preview party. No voices in the background. Odd sort of busy silence.  
   
“Outside the theater where?” James sounded a little annoyed. Why was James annoyed with him?  
   
“Why are you annoyed with me?”  
   
“I’m not.”  
   
“Yes, you are. I can hear it. You sound more… Scottish when you’re annoyed.”  
   
“You…can tell how I’m feeling based on my accent?”  
   
“I always know how you’re feeling. I want to know how you’re feeling all the time. And I like your accent. I like your voice. You should talk more.” Michael stopped to think about this, and then added, “But only if you want to.” He didn’t want to make James more annoyed with him.  
   
A familiar sound came over the phone. James laughing. All right, well. He hadn’t thought it was that funny, but he was much more happy now that James was laughing instead of annoyed, so he could go along with that.  
   
“I like your voice, too,” James observed, still with an undercurrent of amusement running through every word. “You might’ve noticed, I always listen to you talk, when we do interviews together.”  
   
“Really?” He’d seen James watching him, of course, but he’d always thought, no, he had to be imagining things, James certainly wasn’t thinking the same thoughts he was. Especially not the thoughts about how much he would like to remove James’s clothing.  
   
“Did you say something about my clothing?”  
   
Oh, god, he was never drinking gin again, ever. “No. Definitely not. I think… I think you must be hearing things.”  
   
“I’m not the one who got very drunk and thought that phone conversations were a brilliant idea.”  
   
“I missed you,” Michael told him, a little indignantly, because if James had been there he wouldn’t have had to find the gin to distract himself from the absence of warmth. “You were…not here. And I was here. And I kept thinking of things I wanted to say to you, and you weren’t here.” He really needed a new word for at least one of those sentences. Maybe he should start carrying a dictionary if alcohol was going to happen.  
   
He wondered whether the definition of _love_ included a Scottish accent. If he had a dictionary, he could look it up.  
   
“You got drunk because I wasn’t there? Hang on a second…”  
   
“What are you doing?”  
   
“Parking the car.”  
   
“What?” He was pretty sure he’d heard that correctly, but it still made no sense, and that couldn’t possibly be all the fault of the gin.  
   
He looked up from the cracked concrete, and blinked, because James was _there_ , two feet away, under the streetlights.  
   
He blinked again. Definitely James. In his oldest pair of jeans, and a black shirt, with a little v-neck that drew Michael’s gaze to revealed skin like a magnet. Rumpled hair. Unshaven, which made a few more embattled brain cells in Michael’s head give up and depart for the night. And those eyes, impossibly blue under the golden glow of street lamps and the darkness of the sky. Something was still not making sense, but he really didn’t want to question it, in case James went away.  
   
James sat down next to him on the cold steps. “How’re you, then?”  
   
“You’re in New York.” He was very sure of that. James had to be in New York, because he hadn’t been here, with Michael.  
   
“I _was_ in New York,” James said, patiently. “I came back.”  
   
“So…you’re here. Really here.” There was something very, very important about that fact. “Why?”  
   
James glared at him. “Because I missed you. Except you’re very drunk and you’re not going to remember me saying all this in the morning, and that’s why I was annoyed with you, I’m annoyed with you because I got off a plane in New York and couldn’t stop thinking about you, and I think I’m in love with you, and I just got off _another_ plane to come back here and be with you, and now you’re breathing gin on me.”  
   
Michael stared at him.  
   
“We should probably take you home now. I think I saw journalists heading this way.”  
   
“You said you love me!”  
   
“Oh, fuck me, did you drink all the gin in the _world_?”  
   
“You still said it!” He was very sure of that, too. He would be sure of it forever.  
   
“All right, I said it. We should really go. The journalists have cameras.”  
   
Michael let James pull him to his feet, and leaned into James’s arm more than he actually needed to, because it felt good around his shoulders, a buffer against the cold of the night.  
   
They took two steps toward the car, and then he stopped, which almost made James trip as he tried to adjust to the sudden shift in weight. “Hold on.”  
   
“Do that again and I’ll drop you, I swear. What is it? Are you all right?”  
   
“I’m fantastic, I just have to tell you…You said it. I didn’t. I meant to say it.”  
   
“What?”  
   
“James, I love you.”  
   
“You…you’re still very drunk.” James looked away, down the street, and then back. “And if you throw up in my car I will kill you.”  
   
“I’m not going to—just listen. It’s important.”  
   
“Okay…”  
   
“I’m really not that drunk. Well, no, I am—” He did have to be honest about this, since he was making confessions. “—but I _am_ going to remember this in the morning. All of it. You came back from New York because you love me. And I called you because I wanted to hear your voice—”  
   
“Yes, you said as much. On the phone. Can we go?”  
   
“Shut up. I wanted to hear your voice, because you’re the person I want to talk to at the end of every day, and the beginning of every morning, and even when we’re spending all day together filming it isn’t enough, I still want to be around you, and when we aren’t spending all day together I miss you, and I love your hair—”  
   
“My hair?”  
   
“—and your voice, and you. I love you. I’m in love with you. Completely.”  
   
James stared at him under the yellow glimmer of the streetlights, and grumbled, “I really don’t know whether I want to kiss you, or punch you in the face for doing this while you’re _beyond_ smashed.”  
   
“Um…if I get a vote, can it be for the former?”  
   
“Fine.” James sighed, and Michael blinked in surprise, because those were James’s lips against his, soft and determined and cold from the night air, and perfect. Completely.  
   
He tried to take away that little bit of chilliness, kissing back. Wanting to keep James safe against the cold, forever.  
   
James leaned against him, comfortably. “You taste like gin.”  
   
“You love me.”  
   
“And you love me. Do you have a hotel, around here? I might’ve forgotten to make any reservations before I got on the plane.”  
   
“I’m… pretty sure it was the Hilton. Mostly sure. But…you’re staying with me.”  
   
“Am I?”  
   
“I mean…if you want to. You can. I would like that.”  
   
James grinned at him. “I would like that, too. Now get in the car.” Michael did. He was practically sober now, he decided; door handles and seatbelts were not, in fact, too challenging at this point. “And move your hand. I can’t drive if you’re going to do that.”  
   
“Bossy.”  
   
“Oh, you have no idea.”  
   
“Actually, now I have a lot of ideas.”  
   
“Really? Because I can drive faster.”  
   
“I love you.”  
   
“I love you, too,” James said, and Michael put his hand back where it had been, and James, as it turned out, could indeed drive _much_ faster.


End file.
